Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick
Jun 15, 2026 · 45 min · 12 segments
For decades, the church's answer to struggling marriages has been clear: pray more, submit more, give him what he needs. Sheila Wray Gregoire's research asked a different question: What if the advice…
Sheila Wray GregoireGuest
Michael John CusickHost
And what I found was that no matter what I said, everybody still had the same problems.
It's like putting out the good content isn't enough because there's something rotten underneath.
And in talking to people and listening to comments over the last few years, we just realized that many of those things that are rotten underneath come from some of the teachings that we hear in evangelical circles.
And so last year, last winter, Together with my daughter, who's really good at psychometrics and a statistician that we know very well, we surveyed 20,000 women.
And I think we got some really interesting findings of what really messes stuff up for couples.
Your husband's a pediatrician, and I thought this was a brilliant analogy.
You said that he would never dare prescribe certain kind of treatment for asthma unless he knew what the problem was and the effect as to whether that treatment was helping.
And you asked the question, what if our evangelical treatments for sex issues were actually making things worse? And that's actually what you discovered, right? Yeah.
Yeah, like in medicine, they do something called evidence-based therapy.
What we say is let's figure out what the Bible says about something and then let's do it.
Because when I hear Jesus speak, what he says over and over again is that a good tree can't bear bad fruit and a bad tree can't bear good fruit.
And I think what's happened is that we've gotten so focused on figuring out what we believe that we've forgotten about the fruit.
And to me, if something bears really bad fruit, that should be a sign that we're interpreting something wrong.
You know, if you follow a certain belief and you end up with terrible orgasm rates and terrible marital satisfaction, then maybe there's something wrong with how you're seeing the Bible.
Yeah, that idea of asking what does the Bible say and then doing it, there's two problems with that.
The first is that many people can't do that, and it's like having the answer to the question but without asking the question.
And what I found was that no matter what I said, everybody still had the same problems.
It's like putting out the good content isn't enough because there's something rotten underneath.
And in talking to people and listening to comments over the last few years, we just realized that many of those things that are rotten underneath come from some of the teachings that we hear in evangelical circles.
And so last year, last winter, Together with my daughter, who's really good at psychometrics and a statistician that we know very well, we surveyed 20,000 women.
And I think we got some really interesting findings of what really messes stuff up for couples.
Your husband's a pediatrician, and I thought this was a brilliant analogy.
You said that he would never dare prescribe certain kind of treatment for asthma unless he knew what the problem was and the effect as to whether that treatment was helping.
And you asked the question, what if our evangelical treatments for sex issues were actually making things worse? And that's actually what you discovered, right? Yeah.
Yeah, like in medicine, they do something called evidence-based therapy.
What we say is let's figure out what the Bible says about something and then let's do it.
Because when I hear Jesus speak, what he says over and over again is that a good tree can't bear bad fruit and a bad tree can't bear good fruit.
And I think what's happened is that we've gotten so focused on figuring out what we believe that we've forgotten about the fruit.
And to me, if something bears really bad fruit, that should be a sign that we're interpreting something wrong.
You know, if you follow a certain belief and you end up with terrible orgasm rates and terrible marital satisfaction, then maybe there's something wrong with how you're seeing the Bible.
Yeah, that idea of asking what does the Bible say and then doing it, there's two problems with that.
The first is that many people can't do that, and it's like having the answer to the question but without asking the question.
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